gnat greeks out

this year's greekstravaganza 2.0 (the greekquel) was bigger, badder, and greeker than last year's.

for one thing, this time there were decorations:

what's that you say? did i go from chicago all the way to the parthenon to throw a greek dinner party? no, that's my living room, but i can see how you might be confused.

there were celebrity guests:

of course, tons and tons and tons of food:

and TOGAS!

this time we went big on the cheese on fire - in case you need a recap of how last year's cheese on fire went down, here it is:

"a lovely little greek lady at fresh farms market told us to use sherry, but after several failed attempts to light the cheese we resorted to vodka. even so, the cheese was not as on fire as i had hoped it would be.

next time we'll use bacardi 151."

well we didn't find 151, but eileen brought me something polish called spirytus (a rectified spirit!) which definitely did the trick:

we even had ancient greek olympics,

with ancient greek olympic gold medal winners:

alright, they were silver medalists (technically they were cardboard and aluminum medalists but in this arena the cardboard and aluminum medal is the highest honor that can be bestowed upon an olympian).

it was all very exciting and very greek, and so far the best greekstravaganza yet. we'll see if i can top it for next year's greekstravaganza episode III: live greek or die hard.

(this was the first of many throwback posts, written from nor cal about my many backlogged chicago adventures. on a more current note, the first thing my mom said to me yesterday was that there were record high temperatures in chicago. the reason this is funny is that for two years she did this every morning over gchat, telling me from nor cal that it was raining in chicago as i looked out my window at clear sunny skies. well... this time i finally had to take her word for it.)

gnat dims and sums

for a person who loves food as much as i do, there are some pretty inexcusable gaps in my realm of food experience. i took care of one of the biggest very recently with a quick field trip back to:

chinatown. somehow i made it 25 years without ever having been to dim sum. andrew had a craving and said he knew a place, so we headed to phoenix right off the red line.

usually when i write about new foods i like to do some background research first. unfortunately the only interesting tidbit wikipedia has to offer about dim sum is that it's linked with an older tradition, yum cha (tea tasting), in which tea was served with small snacks. thankfully, over centuries the snacks served with the tea took over the show and now we have dim sum. don't get me wrong, i love tea. i just love snacks more.

the photos that follow are of food, all of which was delicious. unfortunately none of the contents of anything we ate were really explained to us, everything was just set on our table with the assumption we wanted it. (this is mostly an exaggeration. i still can't tell you what any of it is.)

shrimp?

...potstickers.

dumpling. and sauce. wonderful wonderful sauce.

shrimp roll. probably.

bbq pork bun. problematic, as they gave us three buns for four people. see unsuccessful attempt to rectify the situation below.

ribs. (pretty confident on this one.)

sesame balls filled with lotus paste. i know they don't look like balls so much as wedges, that's because the woman who brought them busted out a pair of kitchen shears and annihilated them at the table.

at the end of the meal you're glad the table is covered in paper, because they've only given you one of each type of sauce and you've dripped it everywhere while reaching over all of the little plates to dip things.

while i was in chinatown i also stopped in a little grocery store to grab some cooking paraphernalia (sesame oil, mirin, rice vinegar) for mere dollars. i want to shop there all the time.

so it turns out i don't have a lot of exciting things to say about dim sum except that it was delicious. i liked everything i ate (even if i didn't know exactly what it was), i didn't spend too many dollars, and i was full but not so full i wanted to die. 

maybe next time i take pictures of food to blog about i'll write down what it is.

gnat's quarter century: complete with flaming cheese

so, i should start by telling you that ever since greekstravaganza and my failed attempt to recreate saganaki (flaming cheese) in my kitchen with cooking sherry, i have been itching to use the "things on fire" tag again. unfortunately there has been a total lack of things on fire in my life since february... i suppose this is not a thing that people normally complain about, but for months i have been impatiently awaiting the day when i would triumphantly tag another post "things on fire."

anyway - the day started like most others, with a pot of coffee and several quality hours on my word processor. thus is the glamorous life of a graduate student. then, because it's tradition (fine, i've only done it once) i walked to the chicago city farm stand on clybourn and division for birthday tomatoes:

cara came home with treats of a delicious though slightly less healthy variety, in the form of blue cheese walnut praline, cookies and cream, vanilla, and key lime cupcakes from more:

we were joined at the apartment by aleck, eileen, lisa, and cara's visiting friend austen, and trekked over to greektown for dinner. believe it or not, i hadn't been since my first visit to chicago almost two years ago. there are several greek restaurants in the area (and a walgreen's whose sign is written in greek letters), we settled on greek islands.

i was not prepared for how much food i was about to consume. really, in deciding on greek birthday dinner i hadn't thought much further than the very first course - wait for it...

CHEESE ON FIRE!

this fellow is less enthused by the fact that the cheese is on fire than any of us were (or maybe just me, whatever) but we'll chalk that up to the fact that he gets to do this several times on any given night. i also made him hold off on putting it out with the lemon until i could get a decent picture, which may be why he's so cranky.

after the flaming cheese there were gyros with tsatziki and skordalia (garlic potato spread),

followed by a greek salad, of course,

and then several family style plates of greek favorites. clockwise from the bottom, greek rice pilaf, spanakopita, pastitsio, potatoes, keftedes, and moussaka.

i don't know what these people were thinking when they designed this menu. it is way too much food to eat even a fraction of comfortably.

then (why!?) they gave us dessert. baklava, galactoboureko, and some spice cake that i didn't recognize and concluded that it must not really be greek.

like i said, this is way too much food to eat even a fraction of comfortably. we took something like four boxes of food home with us and somehow i STILL wound up so full that i immediately fell asleep upon arriving back at the apartment. how's that for a wild birthday celebration?

excellent variety and sheer volume aside, the food at greek islands is good but not spectacular and i'll probably try a different restaurant next time i'm in greektown. still, they fulfilled my only prerequisite for an amazing birthday dinner celebration - things on fire. (lies. other prerequisite: awesome people to share it with - check!) i'll save you all my expounding on how old i feel (except to let you know that as it is now officially fall and the temperature has started to dip, you can look forward to my whining about aching joints in addition to all of my typical complaints... you're welcome.) and wrap up instead with a big thank you for everyone who helped celebrate my 25th (gah) birthday, last weekend in california and this week in chicago. you're wonderful!

gnat's chinatown doubleheader

back in the day, when i first moved to chicago, i lived about four blocks from chinatown. because of its proximity i always intended to walk over and look around, but somehow it never happened. fast forward to more than a year later -

i finally made it! accompanied by taylor (who also had somehow never been... inexcusable considering both of us live mere steps from the red line) and sean.

you will all be shocked to hear that my primary objective upon arriving was to eat as many things as possible, beginning with a steamed pork bun:

if i look mildly guilty it's because i steered my travel companions almost immediately out of the street and into the first bakery i saw and forced them to wait while i agonized over which tasty treat i wanted.

after wandering through the shops (which i have no pictures of, because evidently i only take pictures of food...) we stopped to sample some fried things. we feasted on egg rolls, wontons, and something called mantou which is just fried dough that's served with sweetened condensed milk for dipping. yes, straight up sweetened condensed milk.

we also ate crab rangoon and potstickers:

you may notice that in the photograph above i am wearing different clothing than in the previous photos. you may also notice that i am holding my fingers up in such a way that i seem to be parodying asian tourists taking pictures. not so, friends! taylor and i are holding up two fingers because this picture was taken during our second visit to chinatown, the day after our first! what possible reason could we have had to go back to chinatown less than 24 hours after leaving it (besides delicious fried things, which are always a good reason to go to chinatown)?

sparklers.

you see, chinatown round one happened to fall on the third of july (also my sister's birthday, happy birthday alex!) and somehow none of us realized until several hours after we left that we had been in possibly the only part of chicago where we were likely to find sparklers and that we really, really wanted sparklers.

so, we went back to chinatown. sean couldn't join us, but we took andrew along for round two.

the stated purpose of our second visit was to find sparklers, but somehow i got sidetracked by more food. what can i say - we stopped in so many stores to inquire about combustible items, i lost interest pretty quickly and became focused instead on delicious snacks.

taylor, on the other hand, was undeterred, and had asked in every store but one when finally the woman behind the counter of the last shop gleefully produced a massive white paper bag full of legitimate fireworks, only $15! as tempted as we were, we said no thank you and bought some cheap dinky ones instead.

because we were scheduled to attend a fourth of july barbecue that evening, we also purchased a whole barbecued duck.

his head may have broken mostly off as we tried to wrangle him out of the box, but we put on a good show for pictures.

despite having gone to chinatown twice on consecutive days and spent several hours scouring the streets for festive explosives (which due to a lapse of judgment i just googled in an attempt to find a good synonym, having momentarily forgotten my last name... apologies in advance to cara in case the department of homeland security comes knocking in the middle of the night) we did not light any sparklers on the fourth of july. in fact, i have no idea where they ended up. i would call the excursion(s) an epic fail, but our search led me to a new part of town and gave me an excuse to sample several delicious foods, which is a definite win.

(side note: the only reason i can think of to be upset about not having lit the sparklers is that since my greekstravaganza post in february i have been itching to use the "things on fire" tag again, and this would have been a perfect opportunity to do it. apparently not a lot of things in my life are on fire. i realize this is a strange thing to be upset about.)

(other side note: i had to ask harmony, who is my resident knower of things about baseball, if it would be weird to call two things that happened one after the other but not on the same day a doubleheader. she said it was probably ok.)

gnat (begrudgingly) catches up

i am experiencing writer's block.

gnat's chicago experiment has been m.i.a. for a few weeks now, and not owing to lack of material. i keep opening blogger, staring at the empty white box for several minutes, getting disheartened, and giving up in favor of stumbleupon or something else that requires no creative input on my part. sadly even now i'm having trouble coming up with exciting things to say about the exciting things i've done since my last update. you'll have to bear with me.

so yeah... st. patrick's day happened.

every year chicago dyes a stretch of the river green in celebration of st. patrick's day. (los angeles, which lacks both a river and a sufficient non-brown population to be very interested in recoloring it, dyes a few pints of miller lite green instead.)

...gross.

the previous weekend i tagged along with taylor and eileen to st. louis for mardi gras (another holiday los angeles is completely uninterested in) where i enjoyed gumbo, beverages in squirt guns, and entertaining encounters with fellow fat tuesday revelers in the streets of historic soulard.

here's a picture of some beads in a tree. i have absolutely nothing clever to say about them.

before leaving st. louis we stopped at the arch, where taylor and eileen (former resident and frequent visitor, respectively) sat looking entertained as i frolicked in the grass and took pictures from every possible angle...

...including the obligatory "pushing on the arch" shot below.

en route back to chicago we stopped in springfield, the capital of illinois and my former place of residence! also the home of abraham lincoln and one of the stranger sandwiches i have encountered in my sandwich eating career: the horseshoe.

two pieces of toasted white bread, topped with a hamburger patty and a handful of french fries and then drizzled with cheese sauce. i don't know who thought these four food items would go well together, nor am i sure it can really be called a sandwich. mostly i am mystified as to why it's called a horseshoe. (wikipedia offers no guidance on this issue.)

also in springfield, my old house!

yep, that's where i lived when i was three, during gnat's illinois residency round 1. the walgreen's around the corner that i used to ride my red tricycle to is still there.

i've been spring break-ing in california for a little over a week, but will be returning shortly to chicago for more adventures. here's to hoping the blogging deities bestow some fluency upon me between now and my next update.

gnat says OPA!

chicago is a huge center of greek diaspora. (according to wikipedia so are new hampshire and florida, who knew?) i'm 1/4 greek, so it's a little bit unacceptable that i've lived here for eight months and haven't been over to greektown to visit my people.

instead, because the end of the quarter was looming and i had papers due left and right, (and because you can only cook tacos so many tuesdays in a row before it gets really boring) i decided to throw a GREEKSTRAVAGANZA! on monday.

before you can throw a greek dinner party you need greek ingredients, some of which are basically impossible to find in your average run-of-the-mill grocery store. aleck (a fellow greek and chicago native) was kind enough to poll his relatives about their preferred food shopping location, and the overwhelming consensus was:

fresh farms market! way out in the northwest suburbs of chicago. lucky for me, taylor was as excited about the prospect of a grocery-related field trip as i was, so on saturday we embarked on a mini road trip to niles, IL to get all of the goodies on my list.

so, fresh farms market is my new favorite place. i'll spare you a detailed description of our time there, because odds are we will be going back and it will get its own post. despite my giddiness throughout the shopping experience somehow i managed to exhibit a tremendous amount of restraint and only left with things on my list.

...it was a long list.

my menu was pretty ambitious, so i began to prep little by little on saturday and sunday.

by the time guests began to arrive on monday, i was greeksuited up and in the last stages of cooking.

there was a veritable smorgasbord of all my favorite foods to cook and eat: dolmas, moussaka, tsatziki, greek salad, lemon chicken, spanakopita, shaareya and tabbouleh, the last two of which are actually egyptian but shhhhh.

side note: smorgasbord is a swedish word for a buffet type food situation. unfortunately, extensive google searching (and mother phone calling) has failed to turn up a greek equivalent.

the most exciting food item by far was the saganaki. saganaki is a hunk of kefalotyri cheese that's been floured, egg washed, floured again, pan fried, soaked in booze, then lit on fire. that's right - cheese on fire. saganaki isn't actually traditonally greek, but originated in a restaurant right here in chicago's greektown.

a lovely little greek lady at fresh farms market told us to use sherry, but after several failed attempts to light the cheese we resorted to vodka. even so, the cheese was not as on fire as i had hoped it would be.

next time we'll use bacardi 151.

also notable, although probably to nobody but me, my first truly successful baklava making attempt. it turns out the secret is to use a loooooot of butter. i won't tell you how much.

we wore laurels and togas, we listened to greek music, we wined and dined. we GREEKSTRAVAGANZA!d, that truly is the only word for it.

once the guests had gone i promptly passed out on the couch.

throwing a GREEKSTRAVAGANZA! is hard work.

the next day, because it was tuesday and there was a downright disgusting amount of leftover food, (and because i was in the midst of far less fun than GREEKSTRAVAGANZA! excessive procrastination induced paperwritingstravaganza) i had greek tacos for dinner.

don't be fooled, they may look cool but there is a reason that greek tacos are not a real thing.

one of these days i will make it to actual greektown. in the meantime, i am up to my ears in enough leftover dolmas and tsatziki to keep me fed through the remainder of paperwritingstravaganza.

OPA!